Even though this week fell over Christmas, there was still some Chia news worth catching up on. It hasn’t slowed down completely, and in fact I think some of the biggest news of the year so far came to me on Christmas morning.
The first thing I covered in the week was actually news from the week before, but it took me a bit to get to it. That doesn’t mean the launch of Chia Network’s new documentation site isn’t big news. It is. Useful and readable documentation will end up being “make or break” for a tool like Chia when it comes to integrating with the big multinational or national clients they are courting. And this site is a huge improvement to what came before.
Next came another big dusting of the Chia network, with more farmers knocked offline and additional issues. This has sparked a debate about general reliability with Chia and what the minimum requirements are. It seems pretty clear that even if you are not running an underpowered node during these periods of high transaction volumes that enough slow nodes in your connection circle and you will probably get behind on farming too.
Next there came a fun announcement from Chia Network that was either incredibly well timed or a response to Ryan’s post about fun in Chia last week. They are going to be giving out two Chia Holiday 2021 tokens to all farmers who farmed blocks before Christmas, and those tokens will be usable as either Chia merch coupons or in exchange for an NFT. This is a nice little bit of holiday cheer from Team Chia, and in the holiday spirit is a kindness that they didn’t have to do. So of course some folks on Reddit got upset because they haven’t won a block yet.
Next, Ryan made some predictions about the price of XCH over the next few years, for some reason. In print. On the Internet. So go check it out, make a note of what he says so in a year, two years and in three you can all tweet at him and tell him how wrong he was. Or maybe he’s a prophet and will tell us all he told us so. I guess we only have to wait to know for sure.
And then it was Christmas. Not a lot of development work was done, and I certainly didn’t spend a lot of time on my computer, opting to hang out with family instead. But I did post a Merry Christmas message with a giveaway for anyone who comments there with an XCH light wallet address. I am going to run that until some time today, and then close it off and send out the tokens / coins. So if you haven’t tossed your wallet address yet you still have a little time.
The final news for the week might have been the biggest. Mad Max, the guy who sped up plotting with his very high quality plotter is developing his own cryptocurrency loosely based on Chia. It seems to address a number of issues and concerns Chia community members have with the Chia code, and I think is one of the more interesting projects to come out of this space yet. I will be keeping a close eye on this, and building my own node on testnet at least.
